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COMMENTARY
February 18, 2004
Women & minorities
Paul Bremer the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq must sign off on the interim constitution that the various factions in the Iraqi Governing Council are in the final month of negotiating. He is in the odd position now of defending women's rights that were previously secured under Saddam Hussein's soi-disant "constitution" from demands they be eliminated in the name of the Sharia -- the body of doctrine that must govern all human behaviour according to Islamic tradition. In a rather nervy presentation in the Shia holy city of Karbala before an audience of 100 female beneficiaries of small U.S. aid programmes (most of whom required their husband's permission to attend and their further permission to shake his hand) Mr. Bremer declared that he would in fact veto any Iraqi constitutional proposal that failed to acknowledge legal equality between men and women. While he has allowed that Islam will be "an inspiration" for the country's laws the law code itself must be secular and consistent with what the U.S. and U.N. for that matter believe are universal human rights. His problem is this is Iraq. Everything I have recently seen from Iraq suggests that Islam is winning. This is not a question of terrorists from the Sunni Triangle prevailing by intimidation; for they are not. Rather the power of the Shia Grand Ayatollah Sistani is growing with the numbers he can mobilize for street demonstrations; and within the Iraqi Governing Council itself Islamic authenticity is replacing "democracy" at the top of the daily agenda. Already for instance strict Islamists have grabbed control of all of Iraq' s universities except the three in Kurdistan. This has been done under the direction of Ziad Aswad the interim minister of higher education. Mr. Aswad is himself a Wahabi Muslim -- the most fundamentalist large Islamic sect associated with the Saudi Arabian state and Al Qaeda. The university presidents in turn decree that no woman may appear on campus except covered head-to-toe. And so forth. As Paul Marshall has been documenting -- an American scholar affiliated with the Claremont Institute and Freedom House in Washington whose information on Third-World persecution of religious minorities is in my experience often the most reliable -- the problem runs deeper. The rights of all non-Muslim minorities in Iraq are being trampled under an increasingly self-confident Islamism with e.g. numerous murderous attacks on Assyrian Christians their businesses and schools. He mentions as well forcible conversions of e.g. the Sabaean Mandeans (followers of John the Baptist) of Fallujah -- the men compelled to accept Islam at gunpoint and their wives and children taken away. These developments cannot be separated from the growing persecution of Christians and other religious minorities throughout the Muslim world. Fatwahs from radical imams declaring that various classes of "infidels" may be killed with impunity and their property seized are more common today in Pakistan and Indonesia than in Iraq. The United States is hardly in a position to stop this from happening internationally; and its power within Iraq itself wanes as the U.S. military removes the threat of a Ba'athist restoration. The removal of Saddam's regime has like the collapse of Communism in Europe taken the lid off Iraqi society. That lid was held down only by the mass-murder that has now been exposed in several hundred Iraqi killing fields -- graves in which Saddam and his henchmen deposited anyone who resisted his essentially secular totalitarian order. Ethnic religious and tribal convulsions that might have been resolved in an earlier generation were frozen and are now wriggling back to life -- but in this case much aggravated by the growth of Islamic fanaticism throughout the region. For compounding the situation on the ground in Iraq is the arrival of the Saudi-sponsored "Afghan Arabs" the Palestinian and Hezbollah jihadists and recruits from Europe's Muslim ghettoes for whom Iraq today provides the kind of "liberation theatre" that Afghanistan did in the 1980s when Muslims volunteered to fight the Soviet occupation. As the interception of the Zarqawi terrorist strategy document has shown their whole purpose in life is now to exploit the divisions in Iraqi society using massacres to trigger a civil war. Democracy cannot be imposed on Iraq. First the conditions for democracy would have to be imposed which would take both more force and more time than the Americans have at their disposal. Paul Bremer may try to leave things better than he found them but in the end the Iraqis will determine their own future courageously or otherwise. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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